Jude Dry | Monsieur Le Butch / 2022

the mushroom cut

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jude Dry (screenwriter and director) Monsieur Le Butch / 2022 [12 minutes]

 

Monsieur Le Butch begins with a young woman (filmmaker Jude Dry) cutting her own hair into a rather lesbian-butch like “do,” before she offers an outdoors haircut to her mother, Cecelia. Cecelia appreciates having her own personal hairstylist and wonders what her “daughter” might with wish to call her new outdoor hairdressing salon, an idea to which Jude appears rather cold.  “She”* later replies rather negatively to the entire idea—“he” is after all a filmmaker, and Jude, moreover, does not identify with the female pronoun. As Jude later makes clear, “she” does not identity as a “girl” or a “woman.”

     Jude has evidently returned home to be with her feisty mother in Vermont during the COVID quarantine, the two of them left alone to work out their differences regarding Jude’s gender, all of which Jude hopes to capture on film. Jude’s suggestion for a salon name is the unimaginative “Jude’s Vermont Salon.” No, that won’t at all do, suggests the mother.

     In fact, Cecelia, appears to be anything but an out-of-touch or dismissive mother. She’s been reading about the sexual “Other,” and wonders if Jude does not identify sexually as an “other,” how does “she” define herself? That’s the difficulty, answers Jude, I don’t know how to define me

yet. “That’s the point of the movie.” Her mother begs, at least, for an old “lady pass” or perhaps even a “mother pass” on the whole pronoun “thing.”

     Jude isn’t amused. “Let’s not talk about the pronoun thing; it will just upset me.”

     Cecelia quite brilliantly responds: “Isn’t that what we’re doing here? Upsetting each other?”

     The, however, mother even writes her own monologue to explain her difficulties with the changes in her former daughter, particularly when Jude suggests that since “I am home with someone to care for me,” perhaps this is as good time as ever to have “top surgery,” an idea which the mother begs Jude to postpone at least until after her own death.

     Yet it’s clear that this wonderful woman is not about to soon disappear. At one moment when the two are not quite seeing eye-to-eye, Jude complains that Cecelia is not truly facing the difficulties her offspring is posing, and argues, incidentally, that the monologue is far too long.

      But everyone dealing with gender changes should have such an open-minded friend as this mother reveals herself to be. The film takes us a short visit to Jude’s favorite swimming hole, where he swims topless, and shows him about the house in various discussions with the mater. But it keeps returning us to the wonderful moments of this woman’s former daughter clipping her own mother’s hair. At one point the elderly woman finally decides what her offspring might call the mythical outdoor haircutting salon: “Monsieur Le Butch.” But even here Jude seems recalcitrant, suggesting “he” or “they” don’t speak French. But we can see the title, nonetheless, intrigues.

      Finally, the mother recounts a wonderful story of taking her then young daughter to get a haircut. The barber handed her a large book of both girl’s and boy’s haircuts from which to choose the style. As Jude leafed quickly through the front of the book, devoted to female cuts, “she” finally became entranced with what “she” saw upon reaching the boy’s pages. And finally the child’s eyes grew wide pointing with her chubby finger at one particular style, a “mushroom” cut, the mother realizing “that kid knows exactly what they want and who they are. And you’ve never lost that quality. It’s something I admire so much about you.”

      “And did you let me get the boy’s haircut?” Jude enquires.

      Well, “you know, there’s no letting you do anything; if you want something there’s no stopping you. But yes it was a mushroom cut, and Monsieur Le Butch you were right then. It suited you perfectly. You looked adorable.” She pauses, changing the word, to “handsome.” Jude kisses Cecelia on the cheek, having finally recognized that the mother has not only perceived early on the differences of her offspring, but that she has already slipped her “daughter” into a new pronoun in the use of the general “they” and “them,” and applying the world “handsome” instead of the more feminine appellation of “adorable.”

       Yes, “Monsieur Le Butch,” Cecelia proclaims, “He’s stylish. He’s cool.”

 

*I have purposely used shifting pronouns throughout this short piece to demonstrate the problems in self-identification Jude and her mother are facing in their encounters.

 

Los Angeles, August 14, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).

Clu Gulager | A Day with the Boys / 1969

cold war strategies for the hot war to come

by Douglas Messerli

 

Clu Gulager (screenwriter and director) A Day with the Boys / 1969

 

When we describe something as being “on the surface” regarding a narrative work, we generally mean what is most apparent, what we perceive as obvious from our first reading or viewing. Yet any interesting work, we recognize, offers numerous other layers of meaning or perhaps even confusion regarding aspects of character, plot, dialogue, and location that when we consider the work more carefully seem to suggest other possible meanings or simply unexplained incidents that force us to rethink the work we have just seen or read. In the most significant works, many of these inexplicable aspects can never be thoroughly comprehended, just like our lived experience. There are always other possibilities, greater depth to be reckoned with in the best of literary and cinematic creations.

 

     So when I say that upon my first viewing of Clu Gulager’s A Day with the Boys (1969), I felt it was an enormously interesting and beautiful work that seemed worth writing about but not within the context of my queer cinema explorations, I’m talking about that “surface” reading which I first established in relation to my second and third viewings of this film I needed to help myself explain things—mostly unsuccessfully—which, in turn, led me to include it in the context of my LGBTQ writings. I am still not sure that the fascinating 18-minute work belongs within this context, but the very fact that it remains a “queer” text in the ordinary meaning of that word makes me want to bring it into the “queer cinema” fold.

      On the surface Gulager’s film seems to belong in the same genre with Peter Brook’s film version of William Goldings’ novel Lord of the Flies (1963) or, if we might expand it to include a more idealistic vision of boyhood, something like Ralph G. Bluemke’s Robby (1968) where a boy, discovering himself shipwrecked on an island with only another boy as his companion goes wild in the Robinson Crusoe pattern of going native in order to survive. Although both of these works involve nudity, neither are apparent LGBTQ works unless you are a voyeuristic pedophile.

     The 1950s and 60s were filled with such considerations of nature vs. nurture which these two films evoke—Mervyn Leroy’s The Bad Seed (1956) is another example—in an attempt to determine whether violence, murder and mayhem was born within all of us or was a learned and accultured response. None of these films fully explored issues of  child sexuality, even though they may bring us close if we think of sexuality in any manner being related to issues of control and empowerment. Yet these works seemingly do not intentionally go there.

      They certainly share affinities also with Lasse Nielsen’s and Ernst Johansen’s Leave Us Alone (1975), but that film truly represents occasions of boy-love that somewhat separate it from Gulager’s, Brook’s, and Bluemke’s films; and I easily determined to discuss the 1975 film in the gay context without any qualifications.

      On the surface, A Day with the Boys tells the story of 9 young grade-schoolboys (Mike Hertel, Jack Grindle, Jon McCaffrey, William Elliott, Craig Williams, Mark Spirtos, John Gulager, Artie Conkling, and Ricky Bender) obviously enjoying their summer vacation on an outing that begins at 7:18 a.m. over a vast canyon area (likely filmed in one of the many Los Angeles-area canyons). The boys first appear in near total innocence as they commune with nature, picking wildflowers, running through the weeds, and leaping into the air as they appear to share a communal sense of spirit, hugging one another, allowing smaller boys to ride piggyback, and taking turns sliding large cardboard sleds down a steep incline, including the group pet by giving him a protective box in which to make the same run. All of this is helped by composer Michael Mention’s elegiac score and cinematographer László Kovács’ golden burnished landscapes.       

     Things get a bit more complex, the music representing those shifts, when one boy finds a snake and dangles it around his wrist and neck. And by late morning they have entered a burning garbage dump, gathering up odd things such as an old license plate, a tin can, a yellowing newspaper, a broken umbrella, and a pair of woman’s high heels which one of the boys puts on. Soon after, they run the fields brandishing large branches as if they were weapons. Total innocence has clearly transmogrified into something slightly different through their involvement with the remnants of culture that lies outside of their childhood isolation.

     Yet all the images, at times overlaying the previous, at other times perfectly framed in long shots and closeups, give the feeling of the entire as a kind of Hallmark greeting card. Surely these sweetly beautiful, mostly blonde-haired lads are the very image of undeterred childhood. Their beauty alone evidences their playful goodness.

      Even the public mural which Gulager inserts, painted in some of the same yellow, brown, and orange tones as Kovács’ shots, gives testament to their cultural identity. We know these boys; they are us in the days when in small town USA, where I grew up, you could truly step out of your house in the morning and roam through the fields and neighborhoods around until you were tired and dinner was ready to be served. My father had a whistle to call us when it was time to return home. We were recognized as something like roaming steers or cats to be rounded up before the sun set.

      They soon overrun an empty playground, whirling on a merry-go-round, and swinging away for hours without the need of parental control. These boys are iconic images, so it appears, of American youth.

      At 11:00 they reach another buried trash spot guarded by large scavenging birds and crows who the boys rambunctiously scare off. Soon after they have retrieved their toy rifles with which they began the day, however, and are carefully creeping through the terrain to discover and engage one of their peers as he signals his existence from time to time with a musical song boomed out on his small portable radio. But even here their tangles with imagery death seem more like “tangos with death” as radio plays just such a song and they uniformly peek out of the pilings behind which they hide and return to disappear from sight.

     But at that very moment they spot something else yards off on the streets of the area in which the probably live: a businessman (James Kearce) dressed in his suit and carrying a briefcase as he parks his car to walk home.

     One of their group cries out with the discovery pointing at the walking man of Stanley Hill. The composer’s music turns highly dissonant as the man, observing the children, briefly waves to them. In the midst of such a wild terrain which the boys temporarily abandon, the man appears almost as a comic figure, reminding one a bit of Saturday Night Live’s Dan Ackroyd playing an awkward family man.

     The small military unit come running and surround him, apparently trying to encourage him to join them. At 1:0l he agrees, half following, half leading them back into their raw paradise. Still fully besuited, briefcase in hand he marches with them across fields, trotting near fence lines, the camera catching a double image of the retinue as if it were a major military deployment, their travels accompanied by a quietly beating snare-drum.     

     

   A few minutes later they run down an old rail line, the snare drum picking up its beat. And finally we see them spread out in the open landscape under a single tree, two horses looking on, a scene that cannot help but remind us a little of the Ingmar Bergman representation of death in The Seventh Seal. We can now guess where this all might be leading, but we’re still disbelieving. What could these imps possibly accomplish of their own accord?

     Symbolically, the children can apparently play out a great deal of horrific adult wartime behavior. After walking him up a long hill they enter a high woodland where they lead him through a dense undercover of flowering plants and branches. At 4:15 our businessman has removed his suit jacket but still is playing the good sport in joining in their childhood games.

      At a small brick outbuilding they stand him up against a wall, still broadly smiling as they take out their weapons while another of them yells fire. They shoot him dead, jumping up and down with absolute pleasure. Agreeing to what he intuits as their desire, he removes a few branches and lays down upon the forest floor to play dead.

      Together they grab his feet and drag him a significant way, dumping him in an open pit which evidently they have previously dug. He looks as if he’s actually enjoying the rough contact, but appears a bit surprised at the ready grave they’ve already dug for him. Before he might even protest he lands face down as they begin shoveling dirt over him. The screen goes black.

     As the music now returns to merry playfulness, we observe the boys patting down the dirt atop the deep grave. One of them plants the man’s briefcase on the top as if to serve as a burial marker.

     As the camera pans slowly right, we see another such grave marked with a golf bag with clubs intact; a few feet later we see another such spot commemorated with an open book, some of its pages frozen open with mildew. It is now 5:37. A few feet over we see another such spot marked by a picnic basket; and finally, we see a grave topped by a child’s play stroller and doll hanging over its seat.

      As the credits begin to roll we hear the heavenly voices of the Jimmy Joyce Children’s Choir, the boys, now naked, bathing in a stream, cleaning their bodies in innocent roughhousing without any seeming awareness of the crimes they have committed.

      It is a ghoulish movie, evidence, as so many writers such as Graham Greene have attempted to show us that innocence is often connected to evil and destruction. Perhaps only experience, as much as William Blake perceived its restrictions, can help us to comprehend that our actions, even if seemingly symbolic, profoundly affect others. Yet perhaps these children, through their culture’s images of war, learned to behave in the manner which they have acted out. Since we have no firsthand knowledge of their home lives to we have no way of knowing. All we have of evidence is the radio they play, detritus left behind in the garbage dumps, and, most importantly, the toy rifles their parents have evidently given them as gifts that might suggest that society may have already taught them to value violence and death; but it may equally be the ignorance of innocence. Just as in such other metaphorically constructed works questioning the dominance of nature vs nurture, there is no definitive answer to explain why children can be profoundly evil when judged by society’s experienced values.

      But no matter how we might interpret these boys’ actions there is still a gaping hole in the logic of this otherwise rather profound little film. And the questions it poses are perhaps just as important if not more important than our interpretation of the children’s acts. 

     Although the film has, despite its obvious emotional manipulations, basically represented its narrative in naturalist terms, it is difficult to comprehend the actions of its major player, the businessman in particular, as fitting into that pattern. Why has a seemingly devoted worker, perhaps one of the boy’s fathers or certainly a neighbor, decided to suddenly join their ragamuffin gang for a four-hour march into the wilderness while dressed still in a suit and carrying his briefcase which he surely might have locked in his car trunk along with his jacket if he’d been anyone with sense. Even if we ignore the matter of the unusual hour which he has returned from work, how might these children have convinced him to join them on an exploration into the wilderness seems to be a somewhat mind-boggling question.

      I will assume that most sane-headed adults would have simply laughed off the request, even if somewhat charmed by the invitation.

      But let us assume that he—like the numerous male Peter Pans of the world, who because of their inborn male authority never truly grow up and long to return to the idyll of their childhoods—suddenly felt an inward desire to play like a child again while providing these boys with an engaged parental figure. Let’s imagine the nostalgia for his youth suddenly spilled over with the joy of their request, and, accordingly, he was willing to go along with everything their imaginations called up.

     But even then, there obviously would have been limits. Surely, having just come from the office, he might have been too tired to traipse out into the wilds, walking long distances simply to pretend to be shot and killed. Wouldn’t he have simply, at some point, admitted he was bushed and needed to abandon their playland. Even the most devoted of parents halt their daughter’s miniature tea-parties at some point. Certainly, as they began roughly dragging his imagined corpse down the steep hill he might have stood up to laughingly complain, or jumped up in the hole into which they had tossed him? Why does he remain so agreeably passive?

      But then, other questions also arise. Any normal responsible adult would have realized that a mature male joining up to play with a small army of nine boys would represent a very questionable situation when these boys returned home to share with their parents what they did during the day. “Mr. Briefcase joined us today Daddy. He was a good sport and lots of fun.”

       Just maybe our businessman had a hidden obsession. Perhaps he very much liked children, especially grade-school boys, and was only too happy to join in playing their games, particularly if they got a little bit rowdy; and most definitely he would love to have been able to join them at the end of the day as they frolicked in the local stream completely naked. Perhaps this is a film  after all as, denied in my early paragraphs, that is very much attune to the lure of “voyeuristic pedophiles.” That, at least, might explain his endless patience with their long trek and their physical abuse of his symbolically dead body.

       And, just for a moment, let us imagine that the boys sensed this from the beginning. If it is easy to imagine this pack of 9 boys as representing a romanticized notion of youth before the repressions of the adult world set in—as a kind Blakean world of innocence before experience darkens their joyful activities—it is also possible to perceive them as the opposite: a small social band of same-thinking outsiders who resist or, at least, fear normalization, intrusion, or any force that they feel might attempt to control them. We all know that youths have an amazing ability to see through the ruses adults put up in an attempt to hide truth from them. They may often be mistaken in their conclusions, but they can see through anyone who might attempt to deflect or alter their determined course.

       If these two forces meet head on—obsession and self-protection—neither can deter their own volition, and a struggle between the two is inevitable without either giving a clue that they are involved with what is actually occurring. It just happens. The obsessed adult, in this case, knowing that if he is recognized for who he is it would mean his downfall, while for the children to admit to anything more powerful would mean to accept and give obeisance to it. As the highly intuitive children of Wolf Rilla’s Village of the Damned (1960) and Anton Leader’s Children of the Damned (1964)—two other movies quite paranoid about children of the 1950s and 60s*—fully realized, in order to survive your childhood, you need to get rid of intruding adults and children who might bar your way—or, in the case of the children in these films, become wise of amazing powers.

       Gulager’s film does not make this argument. And my comments are only speculative. But they at least might help to explain the inexplicable series of events once these beautiful boys get their hands on their ridiculous adult playmate. And if there is even a slightest possibility of this scenario, A Day with the Boys is very much a kind of gay sexual drama wherein a same-sex society takes to the streets to assure its ability to survive outside of the normative boundaries of the world in which it exists.

 

*It’s important to remember that from 1946-1964 the so-called US “Baby-boom generation,” 78.3 million children were born, making it seem almost as if there were more children than adults. Obviously, parents felt they had reason to be fearful of their children, and that generation, in particular, did indeed radically challenge the values of their parents.

 

Los Angeles, May 30, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2021).

Pier Paolo Pasolini | Porcile (Pigsty) / 1969

sins of the father

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pier Paolo Pasolini (screenwriter and director) Porcile (Pigsty) / 1969

 

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1969 film, Porcile (Pigsty), is only a little less difficult to embrace than the same director’s last film, Salò, investigating as it does the consequences and roots of Fascism. While in the latter, children are taken by wealthy Fascist supporters to a retreat in which they growingly abuse them, paralleling the moral collapse of the surrounding world, Pigsty tells two parallel tales, one of a young man wandering the landscape in an unspecified historical period around Mount Etna—a landscape used previously in his Teorama.

      The young man, simply described as the Young Cannibal (Pierre Clémenti), who by film’s end admits that he has killed his father, seems to have been ostracized by society, and now, apparently, is starving, killing a passing soldier and consuming him, later accumulating a rather ragtag band of followers who terrorize the neighborhood. He and his group are finally captured by soldiers and sentenced to death, while the Young Cannibal strips himself naked, shouting "I killed my father, I ate human flesh and I quiver with joy," before he is killed.

      Despite this bleak story, Pasolini films the equally bleak landscape with a sense of great beauty and even dignity, keeping the audience in true suspense regarding the intentions of the handsome miscreant, although it is made clear that he has killed a man simply to dine upon his innards.

     The director alternates this sad tale with another, equally sad one, concerning a German family of the 1960s, Herr Klotz (Alberto Lionello) and his handsome young son, Julian (Jean-Pierre Léaud). Although this family lives in a beautiful mansion built by Wirtschaftswunder (the so-called Economic Miracle) money, and Julian has a beautiful girlfriend, Ida (Anne Wiazemsky, who also played the memorable female hero of Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar)—a woman who seems, much like Fassbinder’s Economic Miracle women, very much at home in the new society—apparently he also has a secret love, and will not travel with her nor commit himself to marriage.

     It is only after Herr Klotz’s rival, Herdhitze (Ugo Tognazzi), suggests a business merger that we discover that Julian’s real loves consist of the pigs on his father’s estate and, a bit like American playwright/poet Rochelle Owens’ 1965 play Futz and Edward Albee’s later play of the strange ways of the heart, The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, shocks us with the truth. In Pasolini’s telling these extreme individuals do indeed represent human destruction and rebellion against corrupt systems as in Owens and Albee. But Julian’s ending, alas, is more similar to Tennessee Williams’ character Sebastian Venable in Suddenly, Last Summer, particularly when Herr Klotz’s son is eaten by the pigs he has bestialized, just as Sebastian is “eaten” by the boys he has fucked.

    While we certainly recognize that Pasolini is making some highly political commentary in comparing what appear to be ancient medieval systems with the Wirtschaftswunder and, by association, with the Third Reich—the very same connections made, more brilliantly if I may say, by Fassbinder, a few years later, particularly in his In a Year of Thirteen Moons—there is still something fetching and disconnected in his tales. Yes, the Young Cannibal and the lover of pigs may be the natural result of their parental desires for vast power and wealth, but Pigsty doesn’t really reveal that, merely pointing to it, almost as if it should be self-evident.

     Any of us who were born during or shortly after World War II know that to be the case, but, although certainly using the kinds of satirical tropes that Fassbinder did, doesn’t truly take it to the surrealist perspectives of Fassbinder’s work or Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist, of a year later.

     Nonetheless, Pigsty is an important film in Pasolini’s career, demonstrating his historical sense of horrifying behavior resulting from the even more terrifying greed of a previous generation; the sins of the father, in this case however, need to be more carefully reiterated.

 

Los Angeles, February 24, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2019).

 

Costa-Gavras | Z / 1969

sound and fury

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jorge Semprún and Costa-Gavras (screenplay, based on the novel by Vassilis Vassilikos), Costa-Gavras (director) Z / 1969

 

Watching Costa-Gavras’ Z yesterday afternoon, I was suddenly reminded of my first viewing, probably in late 1969 after I returned from New York City to Madison, Wisconsin where I was a student; and I suddenly realized that that movie alone was probably the reason why I had for so long been a sort of inexplicable admirer of political thrillers over the years such as, Three Days of the Condor (1975), All the President’s Men (1976), JFK (1991), and others.

     All of these films shared less an interest in the actual machinations of politics than they did in exploring the mysteries of political cover-ups and in the way those in power have of controlling and altering our perceptions of reality. Alas, in most of these films—with perhaps the exception of All the President’s Men—in one way or another the forces of political evil win out over the good. But winning the battle for knowledge seems far superior to winning the war against injustice, which any political cynic will tell, returns to cultures in a fairly cyclical pattern. Someday soon we will be watching a film about how Donald J. Trump was brought to justice, or, perhaps, how this lies and terrifying behavior were finally publicly revealed only to have them covered over again with alternate truths.

    Both possibilities happened after of the assignation of Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis, who in 1963 was publicly “murdered” by members of the then-government supported CROC (The Christian Royalist Organization against Communists) by being run-down by a small service vehicle and clubbed to death in the square in front of the small space in which he had just delivered a speech.

      Roger Ebert, a great admirer of the film, nicely summarizes the plot:

 

“It is told simply, and it is based on fact. On May 22, 1963, Gregorios Lambrakis was fatally injured in a "traffic accident." He was a deputy of the opposition party in Greece. The accident theory smelled, and the government appointed an investigator to look into the affair.

     His tacit duty was to reaffirm the official version of the death, but his investigation convinced him that Lambrakis had, indeed, been assassinated by a clandestine right-wing organization. High-ranking army and police officials were implicated. The plot was unmasked in court and sentences were handed down—stiff sentences to the little guys (dupes, really) who had carried out the murder, and acquittal for the influential officials who had ordered it.

      But the story was not over. When the Army junta staged its coup in 1967, the right-wing generals and the police chief were cleared of all charges and "rehabilitated." Those responsible for unmasking the assassination now became political criminals.”

      But the story, as fascinating as it is—particularly when the Examining Magistrate (Jean-Louis Trintignant) begins to explore the dead politician Lambrakis’ (Yves Montand) murder, or as he describes it “the incident”—is not nearly as important as Costa-Gavras’ and his cinematographer Raoul Coutard’s camera which pushes up close to its central characters in pure documentary style, catching them as, one by one, they are being run down by automobiles, clubbed, verbally intimidated,  interviewed, their pictures snapped by photographers, and enduring their families’ and fellow political workers shouts. The minds of the film’s central figures, particularly Lambrakis and his grieving wife (Irene Papas) slip in and out of time, quickly flashing back to images of unfaithfulness and deep love, adding to the constant chaos of the speeding events the film relates. At moments it is as if 10 or even 20 breathlessly impatient storytellers were simultaneously shouting out their versions of reality while just as many journalists are holding up their images and stories for confirmation. To watch Z is terrifying and yet utterly liberating in its barrage of images and information.

      Strangely, by the end one discovers the truth at the very moment it is cast aside as lies and misperceptions by the military coup. The ground gives way constantly, with nothing but memory to hold on to. It is no wonder that filmmaker Oliver Stone cites the work as inspiration to his own filmmaking, that Steven Soderbergh lists it was his inspiration for Traffic, and William Friedkin perceived how to shoot his The French Connection through watching Costa-Gavras’s movie.

      In retrospect, however, as Slant Magazine’s Bill Weber points out:

 

“Of the triumvirate of stars in the cast, only Montand makes a lingering impression as the pacifistic martyr; as his grieving, semi-estranged wife, Irene Papas could have been billed as Special Guest Mourner, weeping and sniffing her departed husband’s aftershave lotion. When the film’s second hour shifts to the pursuit of the truth by a straitlaced but zealously fair-minded magistrate, Jean-Louis Trintignant hides behind his glasses, ostentatiously striving for dullness.”

 

     Far more egregious is this film’s homophobia. Somewhere back in the 1930s, when filmmakers were forced to abandon their mockery of gay men as pansies and writers and directors began slipping LGBTQ figures into their works through code, an even larger number of filmmakers introduced gay figures into their works as villains and other figures who, their films argued, deserved the punishments, often death, meted out to them by film’s end—precisely the point of Vito Russo’s well-documented The Celluloid Closet, in which Z is cited as yet another example.

      The heavy villains of this work, the actual killers, are the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern duo of Vago (Marcel Bozzuffi) and Yago (Renato Salvatori), based presumably on the real-life figures of Emmanouel Emmannouilidis and Spyro Gotzamanis. Yago, the driver, is merely a mean-spirited thug. But Vago is presented in far more subtle manner—which I totally missed as a 22-year-old viewer of this movie, as I am sure did many others at the time—as a homosexual and a pedophile (probably not something the writers and viewers of the day would have thought to separate out). Semprún and Costa-Gavras first make this clear in a scene in which the two, forced by the line of policemen blocking off the entrance of the kamikaze vehicle into the square, are forced to temporary stop in their tracks. As they pause, Vago can be see looking up, a smile of pleasure on his face as the camera moves first to Yago, who proclaims, “One track mind,” as the camera moves back to Vago, still smiling as he answers “Yes,” before panning up to show us a teenage boy in his underwear standing on his balcony looking in the direction of the square from where the speech is being broadcast on speakers.

    The next scene confirming Vago’s homosexuality is when he suddenly shows up to the offices of a newspaper editor immediately after the attack on Lambrakis. Clearly well-known to its staff, he sits on the edge of an editor’s desk, openly admitting his involvement in the beating, and wants him to include his name in the paper to let his friends know. Clearly, one of the CROC members, the editor demands he immediately get over to the hospital so that the press and police know members of both sides were beaten. When word gets out that Lambrakis is dying, Vago returns to the editor, this time as the newspaper is going to press, begging that he retract his name, having realized the foolishness of his wanting to be known for his involvement. When the editor agrees, he smiles, waiting evidently with the intention of awarding the editor his sexual pleasures. But the editor, looking around, whispers, “Not here. Not now,” as Vago goes off quite pleased with himself, enough to click up his heels in delight as he moves to the small bar across the street where a handsome young man is busy on the pin-ball machine.

 

      Stationing himself to the side, he gradually moves his hand over to touch the boy’s hand as he pushes the machine button. When the boy doesn’t respond negatively, he does it again, this time much more obviously, clearly, as the camera moves off, ready and poised to move his fingers over the boy’s hand in the very next moment.

      As if the director hadn’t yet made his case for just how much of a sociopath Vago is, he shows him in a later scene, another club in hand, prowling the halls of the hospital into which he has finally checked himself, ready and proud to do in a coffin-varnisher, Nick (Georges Géret) who is determined to testify about Yago’s involvement in what is now described by the press as a murder.

     And finally, called to testify before the Magistrate, Vago admits to four previous convictions, illegal possession of a weapon, abuse and slander, theft, and…rape. When the Magistrate questions him about the last, his answer says everything that you may have missed previously: “It wasn’t really. I was a boy scout camp counselor.”

      Despite the ugly attitudes behind this figure, he remains, nonetheless, perhaps the most entertaining figure, akin to Nick the stool pigeon, in the entire movie, offering up a constant undercurrent of the comic in an otherwise overtly serious drama. Friedkin—well known for his stereotypical and homophobic portraits of gay men through works such as The Boys in the Band and Cruising—cast the actor, Bozzuffi in a similar role in The French Connection.

    In the end, there also something very sad about this work since is truly full of “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Although the rightists were eventually overthrown, nearly all of those who had attempted to bring about justice eventually were killed in improbable accidents or brought down by governmental thugs. Seven of the witnesses died, all by incredible accidents, before trial. The cousins Vago and Yago served only short prison terms. The charges against the generals were dropped. On the left, Deputy George Pirou died of “stroke” as he was transported in a police van. Other major figures of the leftist movement were exiled or fell from high rise buildings. The list of banned people and things at the film’s end suggest just how cold new world was without any culture: Sophocles, Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Euripides, Aragon, Trotsky, Aristophanes, Ionesco, Sartre, Albee, Pinter, The Beatles, the homosexual writings of Socrates, the freedom of the press, Beckett, Dostoevsky, Chekov, Gorki, Who’s Who, modern music, popular music, modern mathematics, and the letter Z, which was used by the opposing party to mean “He lives.”

     That the US government went on to support the junta is almost just as frightening as the movie itself.

 

Los Angeles, April 12, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).